Art History for Chapter 13:
Rejections of Democracy: The InterWar Years and World War II, 1917 to 1945
World War I buried much of traditional art along with millions of human dead. Art at its extreme fringe became incomprehensible to the average viewer, who was thus deprived of perceiving and enjoying world about him. Some felt that art degenerated to mannerism, using stylistic exaggerations as an end in itself. Artists and writers broke up into small cliques, schools, and trends, whose ideas were often too esoteric to strike a responsive chord with the broad population. High literature contained odd punctuation and stream of consciousness style; music became atonal and discordant; and painting and sculpture became abstract and nonobjective. New high art increasingly became confined to those interested in art for art’s sake.
Most normal citizens were mystified or offended. They thought their six-year-old kid could do better than some of the self-proclaimed geniuses of art.
On the one hand, art became freed from the constraints of realism and naturalism, or from subject and tradition. Artists were free as never before to experiment. Artists explored new modes of work unlike any before in human history.
On the other hand, a reaction came from the totalitarian and authoritarians states, who tried to make art relevant to the masses.
Architecture
As cities continued to grow more crowded more skyscrapers replaced old structures. New York’s skyline became the archetype that other cities would follow in the second half of the century. Headquarters of international business conglomerates shaped the view. ART DECO offered stylistic elements in clean lines and forms suggesting speed and modernity, such as in the Chrysler Building.
One last small movement “dada” (1916-1924) sprung up in Switzerland during World War One. Despairing about civilization as the war raged around them, the created “anti-art art” which mocked what they saw as the pretentions of High Art. They often used everyday objects and graphics combined in new ways with odd titles which mocked any attempt at serious interpretation.
Marcel Duchamps, whose Nude Descending a Staircase had already scandalized many, shocked more with his “ready-made” objects, such as a urinal called “Fountain” or a Mona Lisa with a mustache.
Surrealists went further into combining images in strange, bizarre, or shocking ways. They often strove for a dream atmosphere or incorporated Freudian symbolism.
The work of Salvador Dali (1904-1989) was full of humor, jesting, and shock effects. The melting clocks of his tiny The Persistance of Memory (1931), suggests the bending of space and time.
In sculpture, Henry Moore’s (1898-1986) smooth forms and contours leaned toward the abstract.
As an artist, the Spaniard Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) almost defies classification. In his early phases he aligned with Cubism (see above), but later created his own style.
His Guernica (1937) is often cited as one of the greatest paintings of the Twentieth Century. It portrays on a huge canvas in black, gray, and white the bombing of the Basque capital during the Spanish Civil War. For long it stayed in New York, until the fascist regime of Franco had ended in Spain.
Socialist Realism portrayed scenes of workers and patriots, working or sacrificing for the good of the community. Most Westerners then, and modern critics today, despise the stuff, seeing it as hollow. Yet many average people can at least connect with the story-telling, naturalistic style. After a brief flowering of avant-garde art after the Russian Revolution, the Soviet regime under Stalin ordered artists to use the style of socialist realism, so art could be propaganda for the worker’s paradise.
While bolding using their version of art as propaganda, the Nazis famously attacked most modern art with their infamous “Exhibit of Degenerate Art” (1937). What modern Western critics liked, they insulted as elitist and “Jewish” opposing it with the Führer’s preferred own socialist realist styles.
Only Diego Rivera (1886-1957) and his art of fresco painting for the Mexican socialist government gained some positive critical opinion in the West. But when he put Lenin’s face in a mural in Rockefeller center, the capitalist had it destroyed. His sometime lover Frida Kahlo's dreamlike images, often capturing her pain and despair, have gained a popular following.
